High Stakes with Jeremy Kyle by shoutingatco.ws

How desperate would you have to be to use Jeremy Kyle as your “Phone a Friend”? Unless the question was “Who is my real dad?” or What are you looking at?” we imagine that he’d be as useful as a thing in a situation where it would be useless.

Kyle’s inherent dislikeability hasn’t deterred ITV1, who have popped out the unexpectedly complicated High Stakes, a prime-time Jeremy Kyle quiz vehicle that is orders of magnitude more complicated than the dismal Red or Black.

A contestant is given a row of eight consecutive numbers, and must avoid the arbitrarily selected WRONG NUMBER, which Jeremy refers to as a “trap”, like he’s trying to pick out the right Thai prostitute. Johnny Punter must pick one of the eight numbers, without selecting the trap. Get it right, they move on. Get it wrong, and it’s all over. There’s a little more to it than random choice – they have a limited number of clues that they can use to point them in the right direction.

The clue will be something like “The number of Weasley siblings in Harry Potter”. If they know the answer is 5, they can avoid the number 5. If they don’t know the number, then Jeremy Kyle will play along with them. His little face lights up, because he knows! Jeremy knows! He’s a permanent phone-a-friend! He’s Clippy the Microsoft Word paperclip! He hovers and hints. He helps and prods. He says “sweetheart” and “darling”, like on his morning show.  He’s a drunken friend, hovering behind you while you’re playing on the It Box.

However, he still has that sinister edge. He doesn’t so much walk around his set, as lurk, like an inquisitive shark. “Do you know the answer, darling?” “Do you have a strategy?”

The rules get more complicated: To win the first round prize, they must select one of the eight numbers, avoiding the one trap. In the second round, they select one of another eight as in the first round, but then the trap box is removed and they must select one of the remaining seven, with the option to reselect the box they selected in the first round. Round three has three boxes, through to the final round, where they must avoid six traps.

It’s convoluted, and Kyle doesn’t bother really explaining the rules. We suspect he doesn’t fully understand, and that it’s a running battle with the producers as they try to stop him just being a bastard. Actually, it’d be pretty funny if he occasionally fed them an intentionally incorrect answer, like on the Who Wants to be a Millionaire iPhone game.

The show’s catchphrase for locking in an answer (“I’m committed to twenty four”) is a bit weird, and shows more loyalty than in any episode of Kyle’s talk-show. For some reason too, the friends and family sit in a bunker beneath the studio, for reasons we can’t quite understand. Perhaps they just wanted to reuse the Love Lift from Take Me Out.

The first guy (Richard, Barnsley – pink shirt, gruff voice) makes a mockery of the gambling system, by using all the clues right at the start and easily banking £25,000. That pisses right on Jeremy’s chips, and that’s fine by us.

Bless him, Jeremy tries to add some of that “human interest” shit that we’re not interested in, because to be honest, we’re not that fussed whether or not Richard from Barnsley has a dream wedding, or whether he knows Justin Bieber’s age. And we can tell that beneath that sneering smirk, Kyle couldn’t care less either.

Comments

1. bolls says:

   November 2, 2011 at 2:07 pm

   Fantastic!!!

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